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<title>After the Burial by LittleRedRoseontheValley (TheLifeAndLiesOfFerns)</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27332389">After the Burial</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLifeAndLiesOfFerns/pseuds/LittleRedRoseontheValley'>LittleRedRoseontheValley (TheLifeAndLiesOfFerns)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>My Two First Loves (Visual Novel)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Child Abuse, F/M, Fire, Past Abuse, Sleep Deprivation, Starvation, Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 23:21:25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>621</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27332389</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLifeAndLiesOfFerns/pseuds/LittleRedRoseontheValley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Forty years later, Mason comes home to bury his father. He remembers the monster that birthed him.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Mason Jennings/Main Character (My Two First Loves)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>After the Burial</h2></a>
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    <p>He sits through the funeral with a blank face, looking forward, not at the body being devolved. He does not react.</p><p>His father is dead.</p><p>His mother died years before.</p><p>He is all that remains.</p><p>Sitting next to him, Emma grips his hand.</p><p>Mason does not look at his wife of many years. He cannot, because if he does, he is not sure whether he would burst out laughing or crying.</p><p>After the scarcely attended burial, the couple make their way to the gaudy suburban mansion that is now his. The rooms where he spent his late teens were large and empty, sitting alone in the upper hills of Cedar Cove.</p><p>Emma stays at his side, and does not make him say a word as he draws his fingers along the familiar drywalls.</p><p>He looks at the stairs, next to the living room. The stairs he once could not look at without feeling a weight in his chest, without feeling like he could not breathe. The stairs his father pushed him down three times before he managed to leave for college.</p><p>He looks at the kitchen, remembers the burn of his hand being shoved into the stove. Remembers the way his skin had peeled off in massive sheets, the scars on his palms. Remembers staring at the food on the table and wanting it to disappear, remembers being starved when he was hungry and force-fed when he was not.</p><p>He makes his way upstairs, remembering all the places his ears were boxed and his wrists were gripped so hard they bruised and he was punched in the stomach so hard he was left gasping for air.</p><p>There is a reason he has not been back here in over forty years. He never wanted the inevitable confrontation.</p><p>His father wanted him to fulfil the dreams he was never able to achieve, his mother wanted him to appear perfect before the neighbourhood and Mason had always known he was never loved as his own person.</p><p>Now, they are gone, and whatever remains is his for the taking. He does not want any of it.</p><p>He wants to go back to his suburban home in Colorado with Emma, his children and grandchildren. He wants to curl up in their bed, in the space where he has never wondered if he was welcome, where he has always known his place.</p><p>However, he cannot just do that. He has to clean the place up, clear out and trash any personal belongings, put it up for sale. The homeowner’s association would never leave him in peace otherwise.</p><p>He stops in the room that was his bedroom.</p><p>The bed is still there, still made. It looks exactly like it did the day he walked out at eighteen and never came back, except that now it is covered in a fine layer of dust.</p><p>He remembers being seven years old, talking back to his father. He does not even remember what he said, but he does remember spending a month with no blankets and no mattress, curled up in the corner of his cold stone floor, sleeping under the single sheet they left him, and suddenly he cannot quite catch his breath.</p><p>He is almost sixty years old but he feels like he is seven all over again, cowering in a corner in fear of the man who made his life hell.</p><p>The man who is dead, now.</p><p>Just like that, suddenly he is crying.</p><p>He is not sure how much of it is relief and how much is pain but it does not matter. Tears are falling, and he is turning his face into Emma's shoulder, and Emma is holding him tightly.</p><p>It is over.</p><p>It is <em>over</em>.</p>
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